Realtime environments blog

 I added post processing in unreal to make the town feel more like an old western. I added a little bit of bloom because bloom always looks good, I added some film grain to make it feel older and I added a vignette to complete the effect. Overall, this combo seems pretty effective at setting the overall tone/vibe.  I also tweaked the lighting to make the scene more stylized but the simplicity and materials of my scene kind of limited my ability to get the desired effect. For some finishing touches I added some particle effects. I wanted some smoke and some dust particles to make the scene feel more arid and uninviting. I'm not very familiar with Unreals particle system so I could probably make the effect much better with some more knowledge. For now, it works though and adds some atmosphere. For future projects I would learn a lot more about both unreal and its particles, but I just don't have enough time.  The last thing to do is the video flythrough, I don't have time t...

 Overall, my scene came out good. At first, I set my goals and came up with an idea, although I didn't fully realize hose goals, I came pretty close and learned a lot about the process. My scene was modelled in quill VR and slightly edited in blender; I chose this workflow because I thought it would be easier than modelling things in maya. I thought this because of my general unfamiliarity with maya and also because i had modeled in Quill before. For me it was also more fun in quill. This way of working was more fun, but it led to a fair few problems during development. I first attempted to use unity to run my scene, but this proved difficult due to the way unity's lighting works and the way its materials work. These issues were exacerbated by my models very poor optimization which slowed everything down. These issues arose because I tried to skip crucial steps in development, ultimately costing me more time.   The Quill to unity method had many issues so instead of tryin...

 Today I added some decorations and new meshes to my scene. I modelled some cacti, a small graveyard, added another building and cleaned up the terrain a lot. I chose to add these mostly to add a sense of fullness to the scene, it felt slightly baron before but now it feels more lived in. I added some empty beer bottles as well to enhance the sense that this place had been lived in.  My largest undertaking was cleaning up my meshes, before the clean-up my scene was very unoptimized and was sitting at about 6 million tris, even though it's a low poly scene, so I wanted to clean that up not only so it would run better both in editor and in unreal but also to make the exporting and importing process much less laborious. I was able to use quill to optimize my meshes by layer, so I optimized each mesh to a point where it lost little quality but increased performance. This was easy for the boxy shapes but much more difficult to rounded shapes. Some of those more rounded shapes came ...